We consider psychological stress in a different category than physical. It's seen as uniquely cruel because it corrupts intangible things like identity and humanity, not knees and joints. We get physically laborious jobs... They're grueling but we understand the inputs, outputs and the toll.
Putting someone in front of the worst of humanity (CSAM, murder, suicide, bestiality etc) for 9 hours a day at $2/hr seems inhumane because it may very well change who they are and how they think. Add to that the fact that it's sponsored by the richest companies on the planet for the benefit of the upper half and you get the current, IMO justified, criticisms.
If you're looking for examples critical of humanity you have lots of options (mostly from the last two centuries). Notes from Underground and The Death of Ivan Ilyich fit the bill.
I reread the former relatively recently (first time since college). It's dark, not for the easily affected.
Isn’t the latter an excerpt of The Brothers Karamazov? When I read it, it felt more like a criticism on certain economic theories, rather than people specifically.
Nope, separate work! But indeed, it can be considered both... The emptiness of bourgeoisie/wealthy values and the superficiality of the humans that host them
Russian Literature is so tedious. There is no Russian writer better than America's own Adam Sandler.
People dismiss Jack and Jill as Adam Sandler in a dress, which is rather like dismissing The Brothers Karamazov as some men being upset about their father.
Dostoevsky's The Double concerns a man tormented by another version of himself. Sandler advances the inquiry by asking: what if that version came for Thanksgiving and wouldn't fucking leave?
Casting himself as both siblings makes Jack's disgust at Jill an unmistakable act of self-loathing. He longs to exclude her from his comfortable bourgeois existence, yet everywhere he looks, there is his own face. Critics complained that Jill was unbearable, apparently unaware that estrangement from the self is supposed to be uncomfortable.
Al Pacino, appearing as Al Pacino, completes the study of fractured identity. His pursuit of Jill suggests a desperate attempt to encounter something authentic beyond performance. This culminates in the Dunkin' Donuts commercial, where even his name is consumed by capital: Al becomes Dunkaccino.
When Pacino demands that the commercial be destroyed, he finally achieves the moral clarity denied to the other characters. The audience has generally reached this position much earlier.
It's so unfair that Sandler won both Worst Actor and Worst Actress, while Pacino won only one award: Worst Supporting Actor.
Indeed, except when you get into the critical software realm. Firmware for pacemakers, avionics etc. There are respective ISO's/regulations and enforcement bodies.
I wonder if that ever expands to traditional software when the stakes and blast radius increase significantly with time.
It's almost never like that. Usually some team collaborates with some other team and sets something up with approval from departments A, B, and C with director X signing off. There's rarely one person you can point to. Also, wait a year and all those As, Bs, Cs, and Xs have switched to different roles or don't exist.
Is crazy that production databases at places I've worked are often harder to access than this. So much stuff they do with Flock access I would be fired for if I tried it with even vaguely sensitive customer data.
The dichotomy of our current age. On one hand, all knowing super thinking machines are just around the corner. Meanwhile, this. Almost seems like a feature and not a bug.
What's crazier is that it's basic username/password auth. The officer in this here article literally shared her creds with her husband like a sticky note. That's a METEORIC security risk. Something like Flock should just be OAuth access tokens (no refreshers). Shoot, something like Flock shouldn't even _have_ its own auth provider.
dystopia
/dɪs'toʊpiə/
noun
A vision of a future that is a corrupted (usually beyond recognition) utopian society.
A miserable, dysfunctional state or society that has a very poor standard of living.
(medicine) Anatomical tissue that is not found in its usual place.
Neither dys- nor -topia relates to time. One can apply dystopia in the long time ago in a distant galaxy setup, in some future, in some alternative dimension, or in present time.
Eu- is a classic antonym morph for dys-, yes, and though rendered as u- is less usual it's still the same morpheme that one find in euphoria or euphony.
Both are classically used to name fiction places, starting with Thomas More eponymous book.
That said, neither eu- nor dys- are related to chronology or imaginative consideration on themselves, only about how desirable or awful the prefixed root is assessed to be in the judged situation.
it seems everyone in this thread is focusing on the wrong issue; the problem was not that "sign-in procedures are too lax", it's that these individuals have access, period - or that the system exists in the first place.
People understand that. I think Flock needs to be dismantled but I'm also a bit shocked (as much as one can be these days) that the login procedures are just a username and password from anywhere. Netflix has stronger access controls.
Myriad ways, pretty standard on most corporate networks, to restrict access to corporate devices. I cannot access any of my client's resources, including Web apps, without their laptop.
Simple method is IP whitelisting, easy in some ways painful to keep updated. Vpn is another easy option. But then you can have client side certs, hardware tokens, and endpoint security mechanisms which are probably more robust. Either way, it's not a weird unique thing, it's pretty ubiquitous :)
I have to be logged in to azure vpn to access the development environment of the web application I work on because heavens forbid if our users stumble upon a non-production version of the application on the Internet and yet these people just put everything out there for everyone to see. At least I think it should require a CAC card or a PIV card to access sensitive data like this, shutting down immediately if the card presence is not detected somehow.
I think the idea of Flock (and all modern software, pretty much) is not just to offer a service, but to offer it as dirt-cheap and lazily as possible with the intent of creating reasonable margins for a product that otherwise shouldn't even be profitable in the first place.
Doing things, "correctly" is sort of no longer the place of software. The idea is to build solutions that are comprised of toothpicks and sticky tacky so you can force out whatever the alternative was and make money for the shareholders at the same time.
I can’t run any web apps from my employer unless I’m on one of their computers. Tokens are only generated on corporate systems. IP access only allowed from corporate VPN.
Probably the department's fault for not using (presumably) Entra Conditional Access to restrict SSO to corporate devices / corporate subnets.
This is why if you're building a product, please give SSO for free (see sso.tax) - you shift responsibility, requirements and posture to the tenant's IdP.
Unfortunately that will make you a lot less money. The whole premise of the sso.tax seems based on that it's not intentional.
It is intentional and deliberate price discrimination to charge enterprises more. One example: why do you think enterprises don't just stack consumer/teams Codex or Claude subs with significant subsidies; given that all enterprise seats are API/PAYG now? SSO/IdP + ability to opt out of training globally
SSO is a core security feature, not a value add. I do not mind charging extra for say SCIM or advanced RBAC. I have a different view to business than most SaaS apps, and feel when you bring value and delight to the customer, they take you as a trustworthy partner and want to grow with you. Trust is very important and I feel so bitter paying Bitwarden, Adobe, and all the other enshittified stacks that 30-100% uplift on the base plan to get SSO. I also love my homelab stuff and it's a sour taste when I need to set up some system with local auth. yeah, maybe some nerd's A/B test show charging SSO makes more money, that's a shame and I think long term it's simply harmful (and probably less profitable due to my comment on stickyness and delighting customers being good business sense).
Only a tech nerd would think the solution to massive overreach by government organizations and illegal use of mass surveillance tools is more technology from one of the participating technology companies...
In addition to the other things mentioned, some very sensitive applications in my organization must be run from a virtual desktop, which is itself must be run from a locked down corporate laptop.
We typically use VPC Endpoint Services or equivalent for enterprise customers, ie connect our private VPC with their private VPC. Pretty much the best way to do this, no VPNs to manage or IP whitelists to maintain and all traffic is local to the cloud provider.
Although I would agree on some days depending on my mood, if you've worked enough places you would know just as well as I do that this isn't limited to public sector software...
I'd love to play the game when it's ready. I don't play much of anything but was searching for open-world sailing/exploration games very recently on Steam.
Sounds like exactly what I was looking for... Strange coincidence.
There are a couple of ships you can sail with a simple economic engine - you start small and work up. It has some simple sail handling - its not enough to just turn right/left and manage sails up/down. Multi-sail ships are an interesting challenge but manageable.
It's pretty slow-paced, but like I said, I had a lot of fun with it for ~20 hours.
Putting someone in front of the worst of humanity (CSAM, murder, suicide, bestiality etc) for 9 hours a day at $2/hr seems inhumane because it may very well change who they are and how they think. Add to that the fact that it's sponsored by the richest companies on the planet for the benefit of the upper half and you get the current, IMO justified, criticisms.
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